In Japan, many retail stores such as supermarkets give plastic shopping bags for free to customers who do not bring shopping bags. Many of these plastic shopping bags are disposed of as plastic household wastes. Thus, recently, as a part of the environmental protection movement, some local governing bodies prohibit the free provision of plastic shopping bags, aiming to increase customers who bring their own shopping bags. Moreover, stores give privileges such as extra points or discounts to customers who decline to receive plastic shopping bags, trying to reduce the provision of plastic shopping bags.
Despite these efforts, the provision and use of plastic shopping bags is not decreased. One of the reasons is the handling of articles purchased at supermarkets. Supermarkets sell foodstuffs from which liquid or the like tends to spill such as meat and fish, foods which tend to become frosted such as beverages and frozen food, strong-scented miscellaneous goods such as detergents, and so on. It is better to separately package these articles when putting these articles into shopping bags. Therefore, plastic grocery bags for separate packaging are prepared in the stores.
There is a movement among computer vendors to develop a system that notifies a salesclerk of whether the salesclerk should separately pack individual articles or not. This system utilizes a point of sales terminal and has a data table in which necessary information to assist the packing of each article is set in association with an article identification code to identify the article. Every time an article identification code is inputted, the point of sales terminal refers to the data table and shows, on a display, necessary information for the article, for example, “Put the article in a plastic grocery bag since the sauce tends to leak”.
In the conventional system, necessary information is displayed every time the identification code of an article is read into the point of sales terminal in the commercial transaction with each customer. Therefore, each time necessary information is displayed, the salesclerk must confirm the information and act accordingly. Thus, in a store where a customer purchases various kinds of articles all together in one transaction, for example, in a supermarket, the burden on the salesclerk increases and the process is still not practical.
Meanwhile, a shopping bag brought by a customer is reusable and is therefore called an eco-friendly bag or reusable shopping bag. Although a plastic shopping bag is usually not used repeatedly, an eco-friendly bag is used repeatedly. Therefore, the salesclerk must pay attention not to stain a reusable shopping bag such as an eco-friendly bag with articles or to prevent any smell from permeating into the reusable shopping bag. Thus, in the case of housing an article that might stain the reusable shopping bag or leave its smell in the reusable shopping bag, the article should be packaged separately.
However, in some cases, when housing articles directly in a customer's reusable shopping bag, the cashier may house an article from which liquid tends to leak without separately packaging this article, as in the case of a plastic shopping bag. Then, if the reusable shopping bag becomes stained, the degree of customer's satisfaction is significantly lowered.